23 Comments

quote:a $200 price tag, the DFI LanParty UT RDX200 is almost double the price of the original ATI Crossfire motherboard roadmap predictions. MSI and Gigabyte also have Crossfire boards slated for immediate release, so perhaps we will see more price adjustments here.

Does that mean that we'll soon be seeing sub $100 ATi boards?

Wow! I'm definately buying one if that's the case.

Btw, dual x16 slots are overrated. Will it be possible to use a x1 or x4 card in a x16 slot? Reply

Just curious: has Apple made a determination yet, which company will be making their new Intel CPU based motherboards? Has the chipset been pre-determined as being "Intel only", or could NVIDIA, ULi, ATI or VIA chipsets still be a possibility for Apple's new x86 CPU based architecture?
That is: the official Apple products, to be released in 2006. Reply

ASRock had a few other unique products on display, including those wonderful ULi based boards. The yellow riser on this motherboard is actually for a Socket 754 expansion card. ASRock also had M2 socket kits available, but since M2 will require DDR2, we weren’t exactly sure how that riser would work.

How it works is: the Northbridge, CPU and DDR2 memory slots will be on the CPU upgrade
card. The jumpers will tell the mobo to use the stuff on the CPU upgrade card.
Think of the jumpers as a junction thingie on train tracks, a flick on a switch will
shift you to the next line over.

So all you do is...

(1) Buy an ASRock mobo now (on with the CPU upgrade slot...The yellow slot)
(2) When Socket M2 arrives, buy the Socket M2 CPU upgrade card, your prefered
Scoket M2 CPU...It doesn't matter what it is : Sempron, A64, A64 X2, Opteron 1xx
series AND some DDR2 RAM.
(3) Set the jumpers on the mobo according to manual, point it to use CPU upgrade
card.
(4) Install CPU, HSF and DDR2 RAM on upgrade card.
(5) Install upgrade onto mobo.
(6) Turn on and fingers crossed... It should work. :) Reply

Actually while we're at it, what's the ETA to the A8N32-SLI Deluxe hitting store shelves as well?

I'd love a passively cooled motherboard and GPU since those two items tend to have the smallest, noisiest fans. I can barely imagine the joy of cutting out those two noise sources and just having a CPU fan and the PSU fan. mmmmmm! Reply

First of all, i think that your article is very good but not complete, i can't understand how can you make a review about mobo makers like "ECS" and not make a review about others like Aopen who realy deserve to be in this place :-(.thanks Reply

Well the problem was that I didn't really spend a lot of time there. ECS is actually a lot larger than AOpen too - I tried to get as many of the big guys in at once. There will be some more follow ups in the next couple days.

I wonder why did they put all the PCI/AGP/PCIx cards unside down? I always seemed like being on top was better for airflow. Was it from a old old case design or something? Nothing more annoying that when a website asks for a serial number is having to take card out instead of looking on top for SN :D Or cleaning PC out having to take out card to clean the fan on graphics card better.

Anyway, asus is on right track putting GPU on top, will make watercooling installing much smoother to :D Reply

ISA cards were right side up. PCI cards were made backwards so you couldn't accidently stick them in an ISA slot and short it out. Then when AGP came, they just moved the connector so it was physically impossible to put a PCI card in an AGP slot. AGP cards were made upsidedown because They didn't want to limit the number of PCI slots a system could have. At the time, mobos had ISA, PCI, and AGP all on the same board. With PCI in the middle, an extra slot would be lost if the AGP card was made right side up. Who would want a mobo with only 2 PCI slots? Anyways, now ISA is gone giving more space for more PCI slots so it's not that big a deal to give one up to flip the card over. Just make sure the mobo doesn't have parts in the way on that side of the card. Reply

There's really nothing new about Gigabyte's enhanced cooling mechanism(and the removal of legacy ports). Abit has done it off and on for a couple of years now on their MAX/Fatality boards with OTES cooling. Reply